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Someone said fire D and hire Herb? Where was this? We all know this isn't a fabulous roster, but I doubt you can argue the coaching staff has hardly maximized the abilities of the players. That's what coaching is. Anyone can win with an all-star squad, but how can you make the most of the strengths of your players while do your best to hide or minimize their weaknesses?

I liked the D'Antoni hiring, but he hardly seems like he's bothering to coach this year. Certain players are never held accountable no matter what, while others have a couple bad games and are buring in the rotation. The rotation is bull****, he didn't even know his players well halfway through the year (see starting Nate at pg over Duhon then deciding gee, Nate isn't meant to be a prototypical point guard). They don't defend well, my 8th grade CYO coach could invent better plays out of a time out in late game situations than the offensive genius has managed to, he doesn't get consistent effort, and he doesn't even seem to have their respect. Now if Lebron and Bosh sign here he can be a great coach and get us 55 plus wins... give me a break. That's like me validating myself by betting you if I had a roster of Chris Paul, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Chris Bosh and Dwight Howard I could probably coach them to the playoffs even though I lack coaching experience. Wow, great for me! Perhaps with the players he wants and proper motivation D'Antoni can be a good coach, but for now he doesn't seem motivated and has failed on many levels. He can't even communicate with players effectively and manage egos to keep players happy. Since he's been here, fallout with Marbury, fallout with Hughes, fallout with Nate, fallout with Darko, fallout with Al... mainly because he doesn't have a man to man discussion with people on where they stand, he just ****s them over without explanation. But on the bright side, the more players he pisses off while we continue to lose, the more superstars are going to want to sign here... oh... ****, nevermind

Dantoni advocates should read your post carefully and if they still don't get it then obviously have a problem seeing what's really going on.

Yeah, you're completely right.Why blame the coach? He's only as good as his players.It's bad enough that his players wouldn't play defense even if they were surrounded by players who were defensive minded.Mike D'antoni should be allowed off the hook.I'm going to give him a free pass starting today.

It's time for me to be objective about these debatable topics.And it's also time for Knick fans to break the segregation barriers.We've been fans for too long to have our fan base divided into two groups: The D'antoni haters and the D'antoni supporters.I hope and pray that once Mike D'antoni wins us an NBA championship we can all be shouting, "Hail D'antoni" down the Canyon of Heroes.

Do you honestly think that with a different coach that this team would be a 40 win team? Seriously? Our roster is worse then the NETS! Our PG situation is the worst I think I've ever seen on any team ever. We have a squad of YOUNG guys with little to no playoff experience or embedded culture of winning. Our best player doesn't know how to play D and is playing out of position.

You think that Pops in San An would be able to take this team to the promised land? If you took Parker, Ginnobli and Duncan off of that team they are STILL better then our current Knicks. I know New Yorkers are impatient and want results but NO ONE would win with this squad. It is impossible.

You can polish a turd as much as you like, but in the end it's still a turd. Sure maybe the coach has been hard on some guys and been trying to give major minutes to Chandler and Gallo, but that's part of the vision for the FUTURE of the team. This year was a throw away season. Everyone knew it, Walsh even told you so. The only people that thought they could win with this team were a) Al harrington and b) D'antoni. And that's only because D'antoni is such a positive guy, trying to uplift the spirits of the guys stuck there and al harrington needed to focus on something or would end up going crazy.

Anyone that thinks our pre-trade deadline roster was a 40 win team is out of their friggin mind.

I've seen coaches do better with a lot less talent.Like I said before, if the reason behind D'antoni being hired was to make the Knicks appealing to superstar free agents then that is a dumb reason to hire a coach.The Knicks have basketball games to win and fans to please, they shouldn't be wasting their time basing all of their moves on a pipe dream that might not come true.And to compare Mike D'antoni (when he couldn't win a championship while he was in Phoenix) to coaches that won championships with superstar players seems a bit absurd.

Please name some examples with regards to the bolded proclamation.

Also, how many games would you expect a good coach to win with this current group of players???????? The Knicks have a record and I honestly think that is a very fair reflection of the current talent on their roster. I really don't understand all of the hate for D'antoni on this message board.

Do you honestly think that with a different coach that this team would be a 40 win team? Seriously? Our roster is worse then the NETS! Our PG situation is the worst I think I've ever seen on any team ever. We have a squad of YOUNG guys with little to know playoff experience or embedded culture of winning. Our best player doesn't know how to play D and is playing out of position.

You think that Pops in San An would be able to take this team to the promised land? If you took Parker, Ginnobli and Duncan off of that team they are STILL better then our current Knicks. I know New Yorkers are impatient and want results but NO ONE would win with this squad. It is impossible.

You can polish a turd as much as you like, but in the end it's still a turd. Sure maybe the coach has been hard on some guys and been trying to give major minutes to Chandler and Gallo, but that's part of the vision for the FUTURE of the team. This year was a throw away season. Everyone knew it, Walsh even told you so. The only people that thought they could win with this team were a) Al harrington and b) D'antoni. And that's only because D'antoni is such a positive guy, trying to uplift the spirits of the guys stuck there and al harrington needed to focus on something or would end up going crazy.

Anyone that thinks our pre-trade deadline roster was a 40 win team is out of their friggin mind.

Are you implying that Mike D'antoni is as good a coach as Gregg Popovich? Did you not watch the playoffs the last few years? Did you not see how Popovich out coached D'antoni in every playoff series in which they faced eachother? I'm not saying that coach Popovich would make this Knick team a playoff team but there is no way the Knicks would be 15 games under five hundred if he were coaching them.

You make the Knicks out to be worse than the '73 Sixers and you completely take the responsibility off of the coach.Tell me why the Knicks were playing good basketball in December if their roster is so horrible? As short handed as this team is they are a better team than what they're showing you right now.They just don't have the coach that could come up with the right strategies for them.

Mike D'antoni specifically said that he was going to make the Knicks competitve, during his first press conference.He never said that he was going to wait 2 years in order to do it.There shouldn't be any excuses for why his Knicks played the worst basketball during their easiest stretch of the season.If it was going to take Mike D'antoni 2 years to be the hall of fame coach that he is then Walsh should have hired somebody else to throw away these 2 seasons.These games shouldn't be taken as exhibition games in hope of finally landing the big prize at the end of the tunnel.Mike D'antoni's job is to find ways to improve the way that this team plays.I'm tired of Knick fans defending D'antoni based on what he did in Phoenix.Some of these fans act like D'antoni won 5 championships with the Suns and that one major roster improvement will have him go from looking like Roy Rubin to looking like Red Auerbach.The truth is that D'antoni never has won a championship with a good team and has had two seasons to make the Knicks competitive, but hasn't done it.I am never sold on a coach until that coach can prove that he is a winner.So far, Mike D'antoni hasn't proven that.

The bottom line to this thread is that this guy, Mr. Pringles, is not performing well, especially when one considers all the money spent on him and his assistants, which I believe amounts to about 7 million dollars a year. Instead of spending all of this money, we could have, much more easily, and at a lesser cost, allowed H-Wills to assume head coaching duties, which would have allowed us to head straight to the lottery, year after year, as we are currently set to do.

And as for the D'Antonisexuals, who feel that players are also D'Antonisexuals, enamored by D'antoni, so much so that they'll sacrifice everything to come to NY, how do you think that the instability, constant trades and vindictive benchings will play out in their consideration of the Knicks as a home? Do you think players don't talk about what the Knicks are like to play for?

And Gallinari would have been somewhere else, probably NJ, with his Chinese twin Yi, if we had signed a coach like Patrick Ewing, who knows the significance of a competent center. We would have had a winning record for the past two years, with a lineup of Steph, Crawford, an up-and-coming Chandler, Zach/Lee, Lopez, Ewing, Jr. off the bench and some other good prospects as our subs. Our players were decent, we just needed interior defense to have a balanced team: scoring and defense. We haven't had that since Ewing. Period.

P.S. Did you know Quentin Richardson credited having slimmed down to Patrick Ewing calling him fat? Significance: Q was fat, throughout his time with D'Antoni. Where was D'Antoni then??? On a cylinder of stacked potato chips, perhaps?

Are you implying that Mike D'antoni is as good a coach as Gregg Popovich? Did you not watch the playoffs the last few years? Did you not see how Popovich out coached D'antoni in every playoff series in which they faced eachother? I'm not saying that coach Popovich would make this Knick team a playoff team but there is no way the Knicks would be 15 games under five hundred if he were coaching them.

You make the Knicks out to be worse than the '73 Sixers and you completely take the responsibility off of the coach.Tell me why the Knicks were playing good basketball in December if their roster is so horrible? As short handed as this team is they are a better team than what they're showing you right now.They just don't have the coach that could come up with the right strategies for them.

Mike D'antoni specifically said that he was going to make the Knicks competitve, during his first press conference.He never said that he was going to wait 2 years in order to do it.There shouldn't be any excuses for why his Knicks played the worst basketball during their easiest stretch of the season.If it was going to take Mike D'antoni 2 years to be the hall of fame coach that he is then Walsh should have hired somebody else to throw away these 2 seasons.These games shouldn't be taken as exhibition games in hope of finally landing the big prize at the end of the tunnel.Mike D'antoni's job is to find ways to improve the way that this team plays.I'm tired of Knick fans defending D'antoni based on what he did in Phoenix.Some of these fans act like D'antoni won 5 championships with the Suns and that one major roster improvement will have him go from looking like Roy Rubin to looking like Red Auerbach.The truth is that D'antoni never has won a championship with a good team and has had two seasons to make the Knicks competitive, but hasn't done it.I am never sold on a coach until that coach can prove that he is a winner.So far, Mike D'antoni hasn't proven that.

I am not implying anything. I just used Pop's as a coach that I respect and think of as a "great" coach. Even he could not bring the knicks a playoff run and good showing with this squad.

The knicks played good ball because they were on the same page and felt they had a chance at making the playoffs. As we fall further and further away, as players realize that without some talented ball handling reinforcement we're not making the playoffs, the worse they play.

Especially as the trade deadline came up, players pretty much mailed it in. Our showings vs. the Kings and bulls were terrible. And it wasn't the coach out there playing these games, making turnovers, not boxing out, etc. you can't tell me that this is a playoff bound team as it stands.

We're terrible.

Sure D'antoni hasn't been fantastic, but what did you really expect him to do with this team? a team that has even less talent then last year? Again, if you think this team is a 40 win caliber team you're off your rocker.

I really hope some more trades come through and really shake this team up.

P.S. Did you know Quentin Richardson credited having slimmed down to Patrick Ewing calling him fat? Significance: Q was fat, throughout his time with D'Antoni. Where was D'Antoni then??? On a cylinder of stacked potato chips, perhaps?

That's pretty funny man. patrick Ewing is well respected for sure. The guy is just imposing no matter what. If he told me to lose 50 lbs i'd probably cut off my leg.